Florida election chief halts voter purge for 2014

TALLAHASSEE – Florida’s top election official is putting on hold a contentious plan to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the state’s voter rolls.

Secretary of State Ken Detzner on Thursday told the state’s local election supervisors that he is delaying the effort until next year because of changes underway with a federal database that is used to help identify potential ineligible voters.

But the move comes amid lingering doubts from supervisors who remained skeptical of the state’s ability to accurately identify such voters. An initial voter purge initiated ahead of the 2012 elections found some ineligible voters, but it also wrongly identified U.S. citizens.

Detzner, in a letter to supervisors, said the state was putting the “final touches” on a training webinar when state election officials were told that of changes to a Department of Homeland Security database that tracks non-U.S. citizens who are residents.

The state wanted to match potential ineligible voters found on the voter rolls with the names maintained by the federal government. Detzner said the changes proposed for the database should “enhance and improve the credibility” of the system, but that the work would not be complete until 2015.

Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Brian Corley said he supported the decision to delay the voter purge because he and other supervisors want to make sure information about voters legal status is accurate.

“The Department of State can’t afford to recreate the fiasco that was the 2012 project,” Corley said.

Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho also said it was a good idea to delay the push by the state. He called it an “irrelevant distraction.”

Gov. Rick Scott first pushed to have the state look for non-U.S. citizens on the rolls. The state initially compared a list of driver’s licenses with voter registration data and came up with a list of 180,000 voters suspected of not being citizens.

That list was pared to a much smaller one — of more than 2,600 registered voters — that was sent to county election officials in 2012. Most election supervisors, however, did not wind up removing anyone after questions arose about the law and the accuracy of the list.

Florida then reached an agreement to use the federal immigration database. That yielded a list of nearly 200 names. Some of those on that list included voters who acknowledged that they were not citizens.

But critics charged the push was an effort by Republicans to intimidate naturalized citizens who are likely minorities and the effort spawned lawsuits against the state. A federal court last summer dismissed a lawsuit that a Hispanic civic organization and two naturalized citizens filed last year to block the contentious voter purge.

The lawsuit became moot because of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that halted enforcement of a federal law that required all or parts of 15 states with a history of discrimination in voting to get federal approval before changing the way they hold elections.

After the ruling, Detzner declared the state would soon re-launch its effort to identify potential ineligible voters. He held meetings with supervisors to discuss the new process that the state would use this time around in advance of the 2014 elections when Scott will be on the ballot.

Groups that fought the state on the voter purge hailed Detzner’s decision to postpone the state’s efforts for now.

“It was irresponsible for Gov. Scott to undermine faith in our elections by creating fear that our voter rolls were filled with illegitimate voters when there was no evidence to suggest it,” said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Today’s announcement confirms that the purge itself was the real threat to election integrity all along.”

Detzner did remind election supervisors that they remain responsible for removing any ineligible voters if they receive any information questioning a person’s voter registration status.